


She's Not There

by ravenspaw



Category: Next to Normal - Kitt/Yorkey
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-05 21:14:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17926490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenspaw/pseuds/ravenspaw
Summary: Goodman, Diana.Discovered unconscious, at home.Multiple razor wounds to wrists and forearms, self-inflicted.(trigger warning: discusses and is about Diana's suicide attempt, from Natalie's pov)





	She's Not There

Natalie slams the door as she enters house, even though she knows it pisses off her dad. She’d been hanging out at Henry’s since school ended, but decided to come home to do her boatload of homework – she likes being around Henry, but he’s, well, distracting, and doesn’t really consider schoolwork nearly as important as she does. She’s learned the hard way over the past couple of months that if she wants to get her work done, she can’t really be around him while she’s doing it. 

She heads to the kitchen. Someone left a pot of water on the stove, so she empties out the water and puts the pot into the sink, and opens the fridge.  There’s a sad, soggy head of lettuce in the vegetable drawer, a bag of Hershey kisses in the shelf along the door, and a bottle of milk and three cans of beer on the top shelf.

She sighs. Takeout again. She’s _trying_ to eat healthy, so she decides to get a spicy chicken salad from the Mexican place down the street off of Grubhub. She’s sure as shit not using her tutoring money on dinner when her mom had promised this morning to go grocery shopping by the time Natalie had gotten home from school. She remembers seeing her mom’s purse on the dining room table when she’d come home, so she uses her credit card to pay for it. _They_  could sort out dinner for themselves, she decides. 

The food’s going to take about fifteen minutes to get to her house, so she decides to take a quick shower while she waits. She’s taking off her ponytail as she walks through the open bathroom door, and _screams._

Her mom is lying in the bathtub. 

She’s aware that there’s a lot of blood. 

She realizes she wants to puke. 

She turns around, walks into the hallway, and dials 911. She notices her hands are shaking.  

After a few seconds of eternity, she hears a dispatcher say, ‘911,  where is your emergency?'

‘At my house.’ She thinks she’s probably supposed to add something else to that answer, but she can’t figure out what. From very far away, she eventually hears the dispatcher ask for her address. ‘391 Ashton Lane,’ she tells her. 

‘And what’s your emergency?’

She swallows. ‘Uh, I think my mom just tried to commit suicide. There’s a lot of blood.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t know if she’s alive.’

‘Miss, I'm sending help over right away. Can you stay on the line?’

She shakes her head, tries to clear it. ‘Yeah.’

‘Is she breathing?’

‘I’m - I’m not sure. She’s in the bathtub. I went to go take a shower and saw her in the bathtub. I – I think she slit her wrists.’

‘An ambulance should be there very soon. How old are you?’

‘16.’

‘Is anyone else in the house with you?’

‘No,’ she says. Thinks for a minute of the useless family calendar in the dining room downstairs. ‘My dad hasn’t come home from work yet.’

She can see sirens and flashing lights through the hallway window that faces the street. ‘I think they’re here,’ she says. She walks downstairs to open the door, which seems a lot farther away than it usually does. She thinks she should probably walk faster but she can’t quite figure out how to make her legs do that. 

There’s a fire truck parked in front of her driveway, and two firemen standing on her doorstep. 

‘Where’s your mom?’ the taller one asks her. ‘The ambulance should be here very soon.’

She points to the stairs. ‘In the upstairs bathroom,’ she says. She starts making her way back to –  _that_ , and the firemen follow her. ‘I found her in the bathtub. Uh, there’s a lot of blood.’ 

‘What’s your name?’ one of them asks her. 

‘Natalie. Natalie Goodman.’

She steps aside when she reaches the door. ‘I don’t think I can go back in there,’ she says as the firemen make their way past her. She can hear them putting down their equipment.

She thinks that there’s probably something she should be doing, but she can’t figure out what it is. She glances out the window again, and sees an ambulance pull up and two EMS technicians jump out. A bunch of neighbors have gathered across the street, including nosy Mrs. Johnson from the yellow house two doors down; she just knows that everyone on the block will know about  _this_  latest escapade by the time her mom comes home from the hospital.  _If_  her mom comes home from the hospital.  

She shakes her head; _of course_  she’ll come home from the hospital. Natalie has to keep on telling herself that, even though she’s not entirely sure she believes that it’s true. It _has_  to be true. No matter how difficult her mom is, or how much Natalie hates her sometimes, she doesn’t want her to be _dead_. She doesn’t want her to have  _committed suicide_ in the bathtub on a random Tuesday when things had been going - not well, necessarily, but not badly either. 

She just – just wishes her mom could be a normal mom, sometimes. That she could depend on her to go grocery shopping and make dinner sometimes and to, well, not try to kill herself when Natalie is over at her boyfriend’s for few hours. She wishes things could be different, but never, ever, ever in a million years did she ever want her mom gone via  _suicide._

One of the fireman comes back out of the bathroom. ‘Your mom is alive,’ he tells her. ‘We need to take her to the emergency room right away though. Would you like to come with us?’

She shivers. ‘No,’ she says. ‘My dad, let me try to call my dad and see where he is and if he can go.’ She realizes she forgot to call him. She’s not sure how she managed to forget that. ‘If not I will.’

‘Ok. We’re starting to get ready to bring her down to the ambulance. Let me know what he says.’

She nods, and looks around for her phone, before finding it in the pocket of her hoodie. She doesn’t remember putting it there. She finds herself pacing along the hallway. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, but she knows she has to.

Her dad picks up after a couple of rings, and the background of the call is a little bit echo-y, the way it usually sounds like when he answers his phone via his car bluetooth. That means he’s hopefully at least on his way home.

‘Natalie, how’s it going?’ he asks. 

‘Uh, not so great,’ she says. She’s not really sure how to tell him. She doesn‘t know how to find the right words to explain. ‘Are you going to be home soon?’

‘What happened?’ There’s concern in his voice, she thinks, almost fear? 

‘Mom - mom tried to commit suicide, I think. I found her in the bathtub a few minutes ago.’ Christ was it only a few minutes ago? ‘There was – a lot of blood. I called 911 and there’s an ambulance here. They need to take her to the hospital.’

Her dad is silent for a minute, and then she hears him swear under his breath. 

‘I don’t want to go with her,’ she says in a small voice. She’d go to the hospital if she  _ has _ to, if her dad wouldn’t be home on time to ride in the ambulance. She doesn’t want her mom to be there alone. But the thought of going makes her want to throw up again. All she really wants to do is not think about this for a few minutes and just take a shower – and never mind, she thinks, the bathroom is full of blood and going in there is  _ not  _ a good idea right now, even once her mom is no longer in there. Maybe Henry would let her take a shower at his place?   

‘No, of course not,’ he says. ‘I’m on the corner of Kirkland and Vine, and should be home in a couple of minutes.’

‘Ok,’ she says. ‘Ok. Stay on the line till you get here?’

‘Of course,’ he says.

‘My dad is about three blocks away,’ she tells the fireman, who’s standing near the bathroom door. She can see into the bathroom, and can see a limp figure laid out on a stretcher before she looks away. ‘He should be here in about two minutes.’

‘We should have her in the ambulance by then,’ he says. ‘I want to tell you that your mom will be OK, but I can’t promise that at this stage. We’re going to do everything we can to make that happen, though. Hopefully she’ll be home soon and everything will return back to normal.’

She watches the two firemen maneuver the stretcher down the hallway and disappear down the stairs.

‘I hope so too,’ she says. And wonders if she means it.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea why I decided to write this  
> I like italics and it made the formatting a little wonky, apologies.


End file.
